G.O.P. P.O.W.

I wasn’t in St. Paul, but through the filter of the endless chatter on cable news, here’s how the Republican Convention looked: John McCain became a P.O.W. this week, at the hands of his own Party. It was Sarah Palin’s Convention, not McCain’s. His speech last night was so out of sync with the vituperative tone and stale, hard-right cultural populism of the Convention’s other headliners—above all, Palin—that he sounded less like a Presidential nominee than one of those token speakers given a spot on the program just to prove that the Party welcomes diversity. McCain stood before an arena full of stoked conventioneers, who seemed bored or turned-off as often as they seemed pleased by his remarks, and acquitted himself with the decency and honor that he summoned during the ordeal that defines his life.

This time, though, McCain is collaborating with his captors. By picking Palin he knowingly guided his campaign well over hostile territory and then aimed its nose straight down. Once taken hostage, he refused to speak his captors’ propaganda, but he allowed everyone else to shout it to the rafters. He gambled, all right, but it was in the direction of orthodoxy—for Palin is a creature and an icon of the Republicans’ evangelical base, which came into full possession of the Party this week and completed the G.O.P.’s conversion to identity politics. (See my last post for more on this transformation.) No wonder Pat Buchanan was so fired up on MSNBC, while Mike Huckabee wore the look of a man who missed his train because he was given the wrong departure time.

In yesterday’s Timesprofile, several observers suggested that McCain’s whole adult life has been a series of tests, and his shortcomings have been just as decisive as his victories. “He takes a past failing, hangs it around his neck, and wears it like a medal,” said a former Romney adviser. The psychological pattern with which McCain seems most comfortable holds him initially suspended in perfect tension between principle and ambition; the tension slackens, he slides into a betrayal of his ideals, and then he undergoes a searing period of repentance that ends in a renewed commitment to do what is right regardless of the consequences. It’s almost as if he deliberately sets out to fail himself in order to experience the joy of self-recovery at its fullest. No one would hold against him the fact that he broke, as he said last night, under North Vietnamese torture. His capitulation to the latest group of hard-liners to take him prisoner is a lot harder to justify. But his speech already hinted at the penitent President McCain would be if his current ordeal at the hands of his party’s base takes him to the White House.